


After Arcadia

by DamsonDaForge



Category: Star Trek Picard, Star Trek The Next Generation
Genre: Ageing, Canon Divergence, Gen, Grief, Guilt, Loss, M/M, Major character death - Freeform, Mentions of Suicide, My gut reaction to seeing ST:Picard's ten episodes only, Recriminations, Spoilers for Nemesis, mentions of depression, mentions of euthenasia, spoilers for picard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:14:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27778960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DamsonDaForge/pseuds/DamsonDaForge
Summary: Following the events on Coppelius, Picard feels compelled to seek out La Forge.
Relationships: Data & Geordi La Forge, Data & Jean-Luc Picard, Geordi La Forge & Jean-Luc Picard
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17





	After Arcadia

* * *

It had taken Picard weeks to track him down. After leaving Starfleet, La Forge had wandered for a while and then dropped off the radar. That he had found him only a few dozen miles from Bozeman, Montana had not escaped Jean-Luc’s attention.

La Forge’s home was equidistant between the shimmering of the city lights and its august institutions, and the community of inventors, crack-pots and dreamers which had sprung up around Cochrane’s achievement and never left. 

The view which greeted Picard when he transported down was breath-taking. The ranch stood in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and they towered over the vast rolling plain and the single-storey wood-built house. Ten wooden stairs led up to a covered porch and a large front door.

It was late September and Picard could feel the autumnal chill in the air. Across the way, three horses grazed in an enclosed field, their breath drifting and visible, as transient as clouds. 

Jean-Luc was now stood at the bottom of the stairs, a small box tucked safely into the rucksack he carried on his back. It weighed heavily on him, even though there was almost nothing inside. Geordi must know that he was here and yet Picard found himself stood in the yard as minutes ticked by, ungreeted and ignored. He was going to have to climb the stairs and knock.

But when he attempted to do so, he found himself rebuffed. Just in front of the steps, a force-field gave Picard a shove in the chest. He stumbled backwards, shocked – not by the field, it was firm but not volted. He was shocked by its existence.

His ‘incursion’ had finally got La Forge’s attention, because the door opened and out he came. Older, greyer, but those same piercing eyes that Jean-Luc had never quite gotten used to. He stopped at the top of the stairs and three dogs joined him. Two Dobermans and a Weimaraner stood at heel, their eyes alternating between fixing on Picard and looking up at La Forge. They seemed on edge, all four of them. Unused to visitors, they were wary and watchful.

Picard was hit with a forceful echo of his overture to Raffi, only she’d greeted him with a rifle rather than a pack of guard dogs. 

“What do you want?” La Forge asked, holding his position at the top of the steps.

Picard assessed his manner: hostile, angry and just about holding onto his temper. 

“If you’d bothered to answer my hails or my messages, you’d know.”

Picard’s response came out far more terse and techy than he had intended. His age had scuffed away some of his famed diplomatic skills. The presence of the force-field had also really, really irritated him.

“If you’d bothered to take that hint,” La Forge retorted, “you would have saved yourself the journey.”

Picard, though sorely tempted, decided not to get drawn into an argument. Instead, he slipped the rucksack off his shoulders. He could feel La Forge’s eyes on him as he set it on the ground and unbuckled it. He brought out a white, oblong box. Picard held it in both hands, lifting it up towards Geordi as if it were some kind of offering.

“I came to give you this,” Jean-Luc said.

La Forge glared at it, possibly glaring _into_ it and then he locked his eyes back on Picard.

“I want you to leave. Now.”

“Geordi, can’t we talk? I know… how difficult this is. I know how much he meant to you.”

“I really don’t think you have the faintest fucking idea. I told you to leave.”

He wasn’t going to. His Chief Engineer – his _ex-_ Chief Engineer — could be spectacularly stubborn, but Jean-Luc Picard knew how to dig his heels in too. He hadn’t spent the last two and half months trying to find him to give up within a few minutes.

“What are you _doing_ here, Geordi?” Picard asked, changing tack and softening his voice.

It was beautiful, but so far removed from what he knew of his old colleague, he had no frame of reference. A ranch and horses and dogs, grounded in the shadow of a great mountain range – it was almost the last place he would have thought to find him.

“Research,” La Forge answered.

“That’s not what I meant and you know it!” Picard bit back.

“I want you to go,” said La Forge. “Now.”

“Geordi,” Picard said. “You don’t belong down here with dust on your boots anymore than I do! You were born into Starfleet. It’s in your bones. It’s in your blood.”

La Forge regarded him, gazing down, the dogs still poised at his side.

“I think I’ve given more than my fair share to the service,” he said. “I think my _family_ has, don’t you?”

“I didn’t mean re-join the fleet!” Picard said, exasperated.

“Re-join you?” La Forge scoffed. “I need that like I need a hole in the head.”

“Geordi,” Picard said, not knowing quite how to convey how very wrong this all felt to him. “This—” Picard opened his arms, encompassing the house, the ranch, the mountains. “It’s not you.”

“How would you know?”

“Because…” Jean-Luc floundered for a moment. He had never been as close to Geordi as he had been to Will or Data, or to Worf or Deanna. And then he seized on a sudden memory. “You were at the helm. I gave the order to break orbit from… from Ornara! I told you to take us anywhere, I didn’t care where.”

La Forge was frowning at him, not following his train of thought.

“You chose the Opraline System,” Jean-Luc said. “I’ve always remembered this about you, because when Will asked why, you said _curiosity_ – we’d never been there before.”

“That was half a life time ago. Why are you bringing that up?”

“Because you don’t belong down here. You could have had your own ship by now, Geordi, if you’d wanted.”

“Clearly I didn’t.”

“I always thought that,” Picard said, continuing his thread as if La Forge hadn’t spoken, warming to his theme. “I could see that in you, that potential. That time I left you in command.”

Geordi folded his arms and looked away as Jean-Luc reminisced.

“I left a junior grade Lieutenant in charge,” Picard smiled, “and I came back to a separated ship, a pissed off Chief Engineer and a jubilant Battle Bridge crew. It was that that decided me, Geordi.”

La Forge was looking at the floor.

“That you were ready to run your own department. I knew I could trust your judgement, your integrity, your intuition. Your leadership. I knew I’d found my new Chief Engineer.”

“Flattery doesn’t work on force-fields,” La Forge responded. “And they don’t much care for ancient history either.”

“Yes,” Picard agreed, recognising the need to pull the conversation off this reef of memory and reminiscence. “This is the reason I’ve come to see you.”

The small, white box was still in his hands.

“You’re bringing me his ashes,” Geordi said bluntly.

So he had read the messages. And he _had_ been able to see what was in the box.

“I couldn’t think of anyone he was closer to.”

“Fuck you,” spat La Forge. “Fuck you, coming here with that after what you did. Did he know?” Geordi asked, his ice blue eyes drilling into Picard.

“Know what?”

“Did he know he could have been saved?”

“I don’t understand.”

The grimace deepened. “The body they gave you. It could have been given to Data. He could have been saved.”

Picard was hit with a wave of quite horrifying vertigo as La Forge continued.

“He could have had what he always dreamed of. But you killed him. He gave his life for you and that’s how you repay him? By ending him?”

“He asked me to,” Picard whispered.

“Since when? Since when do we kill people just because they ask? Don’t there have to be panels and assessments and evaluations? There could have been a degradation that was impairing his judgement. Did you consider that?”

Picard found he was shaking his head. “You’re saying… he could have been depressed?”

“Suicidal people often are.” La Forge speared him with a gaze that was full of grief-stricken fury. “Did you think for one second? We could have recovered him. We could have _tried_.”

The last time, the first time, he’d seen Geordi cry they had been raising a glass to Data’s memory. Tears now stood in his startling blue eyes, brought forth by the recurrence of his loss. Picard felt it too, guilt eating into his grief.

“I’m… I’m sure if they could have, they would.”

“Are you?” Geordi said, choking out the words. “How comforting for you. Leave. We’re done.”

“I came here to give this to you,” Jean-Luc’s own sorrow and anger and remorse surging in him.

Geordi looked over to the west, at the towering, snow-capped mountains that were now tinged with gold.

“It gets pretty cold out here once the sun goes down,” La Forge said.

Then he turned and went back into his house, the dogs trotting after him. Picard stood in the yard, the box in his hands and his empty, crumpled rucksack at his feet.

“I’m not leaving until I give you this box!” Picard shouted.

He put the box very deliberately down at the foot of the steps and then looked around. He picked up his rucksack and went across the yard. He dropped his rucksack at the base of one of the fence posts that ringed the property. Then he sat down on it, resting his back against the post. La Forge would get a reminder that he wasn’t the only one with a stubborn streak.

*~*~*~*

It was cold.

Picard hadn’t been sat for long before the sun slipped fully behind the mountains and the chill in the air settled into his bones. He stood up and was pacing the fence-line, impatient, stomping his feet, arms wrapped around his body, his eyes on the windows of the house. All were dark.

An hour later and Picard wasn’t sure how much longer he could wait without asking Rios to beam down some warmer clothes and some hot food. He was pondering how to phrase his request to minimise the need for an explanation when the door of the house opened.

Geordi made his way down the steps, a large rucksack on his back. He moved through the force-field with ease, causing it to shimmer silver-grey in the darkness. Picard arched an eyebrow at that.

La Forge walked over until he was level with Picard and he dumped the rucksack on the ground between them. Without uttering a word, he went back through the force-field, jogged up the steps and disappeared back into his darkened home.

Picard opened the unexpected delivery. Camping equipment. There was a tent, a bed-roll, a sleeping bag and a small stove. Unpacking it, he found a flask of hot Earl Grey tea, steak sandwiches with Dijon mustard and a sealed metal pot, which when opened, contained a large quantity of piping hot stew.

It seemed La Forge didn’t want to wake up to a hypothermic ex-captain in his yard after all.

Jean-Luc set up camp, enjoying the work and the promise of the hot food and tea once it was all done. The stove was small, but it put out a lot of wonderful heat. Sat cross-legged in the unzipped doorway of the tent, Picard ate his supper, warmed from within and without, and he ruminated on what to do come morning.

Geordi might have relented in this matter, not wanting him to die of exposure, but he was light-years away from truly connecting with him. He’d expected a cooler reception than he’d received at Will and Deanna’s, but it had shocked and upset him just how hostile La Forge was. Jean-Luc wasn’t sure he had the time or the skills to break into the locked room of Geordi’s grief and anger, and then deal with the fallout from that. If morning brought no change, he would do as Geordi asked and leave, but he would ask Deanna and Will to reach out to him. He shouldn’t be alone, in this vast wilderness, with that kind of raw grief and anger to deal with.

With a plan of sorts made, Picard cast a longing gaze up into the night sky. Here in the darkness, the vast expanse of the galaxy arched over him. He allowed himself to be bathed in the glittering glow of a billion stars. The multitude of worlds, the countless trillions of lives that were encompassed in that one glance made Jean-Luc’s heart soar with hope and ache with loss.

 _We’d come so far_ , he thought, _and thought the job was done._

That’s what he needed to tell them. The admirals and the diplomats, the legislators and the politicians. That’s what he needed to make them understand. The work and the effort needed to keep one's house in order was necessary, essential and _will never be done._

Feeling galvanised by his conviction, Picard turned in. Sleep took its time in coming, there were too many thoughts and feelings, and there was too much guilt. But when sleep did come, he slept deeply and without dreams.

When Jean-Luc opened his eyes, it was still dark and it was still cold and he needed to pee. He tried to take his mind off the need, but age was its own master and after some short time, he had to relent. He unzipped from the sleeping bag, from the tent and took himself a few metres away. Having relieved himself, Picard looked back towards Geordi’s house. A sliver of moon hung in the dark like a half-lidded eye, spilling thin silver light which was just enough to see by. He looked to the foot of the steps and saw that the small, white box was no longer there.

Jean-Luc felt like a burden had been lifted off his heart. He returned to his make-shift bed and his second sleep came swiftly to him.

In the morning, as he was packing up Geordi’s camping gear, Picard glanced up towards the house. He could see a faint silhouette at one window, looking out over the yard. He imagined he could see a mug in one hand and perhaps the steam rising from it. A hot drink and a hot breakfast would have been welcomed, but Jean-Luc knew that he had far outstayed his host’s hospitality.

He slung the loaded rucksack onto his back and carried it across the yard. The force-field was still on, so Jean-Luc dropped the gear to the floor and left it propped up against the gently fizzing field.

He saw Geordi move away from the window and disappear into the inner darkness of his home. Picard waited for a few minutes but there was to be neither a goodbye, nor an _adieu_. He pulled his communicator out of his pocket.

“Picard to Rios. One to beam up.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to NickBottom and Lyrak for the info on those old TNG Episodes and to the general discussion on Picard which let me vent.


End file.
